Workspace Guide: Save Your Design Tokens Across Tools (2026)
Every design tool you use has a memory problem. You pick a color in one tool, move to another, and have to pick it again. You configure a font pairing in the typography tool, open the button generator, and it starts from defaults. The Workspace feature is the fix: a persistent set of design tokens (colors, fonts, spacing, shadows) that travels with you across every tool on UDT and is saved locally in your browser. This guide covers what Workspace does, why it's built the way it is, and how to make the most of it.
What Workspace Does
Workspace is a lightweight token store in your browser. It holds colors (each with a 10-step shade scale), heading, body and mono fonts with a type scale, spacing, shadow and radius presets, and any custom tokens you add, and it exports them all as one CSS, Tailwind, SCSS or JSON file. Today one tool writes to it, the Design System Builder; no other tool reads from it yet, so the payoff is one export instead of many copied snippets.
The tokens live in your browser's local storage. They don't go to any server, they aren't tied to an account, and they persist across sessions on the same device. Open the site a week later and your workspace is still there. Clear your browser storage and it's gone — which is the intended behavior, not a bug. No cloud means no data risk, and no data risk means no privacy policy for workspace data.
Workspace is also portable. Download backup saves the whole workspace as one JSON file, and Restore backup loads it back, on this device or another one. Share the backup with a teammate or commit it next to your code; the separate token export (CSS, Tailwind, SCSS or JSON) is what goes into the project itself.
Getting Started with Workspace
Open the My Workspace tool. On first visit it's empty. There are two ways to fill it: send a whole system from the Design System Builder with its Send to Workspace button, add colors and custom tokens by hand on the workspace page, or restore a backup file made with Download backup.
The quickest start is the Design System Builder: pick base colors, fonts, a type scale and spacing, shadow and radius presets, then click Send to Workspace. Colors, typography, spacing, shadows and radius land in the workspace, replacing those sections; custom tokens you added by hand stay. Keep editing the system in the builder, where the Preview tab shows it on real components, and send again when it changes.
Other tools on the site do not read the workspace yet. The gradient builder, button generator, shadow generator and typography scale start from their own defaults, so paste your exported values into them (or into your project) when you want them to match.
When Workspace Earns Its Keep
Building a brand from scratch. Set up the system in the Design System Builder, send it to the workspace, add any extra tokens by hand, and export one file. Style your components from those variables in your project; the component generators (buttons, cards, forms, headings) do not pick the tokens up on their own.
Matching an existing brand. You have a brand you're designing for — copy the brand's primary color, accent, and font pairing into workspace, and every tool reflects the brand when you use it. Generate a palette variation, design a new component, prototype a new section, all consistently themed without reconfiguring per-tool.
Teaching or handoff. Hand someone a workspace backup and they restore the exact same tokens, with the client's colors, fonts and scales in one place and one export ready to paste into a project.
Multi-brand workflows. Keep one backup file per client or project and restore the one you need when you switch. Less elegant than account-based multi-brand support would be, but no-cloud means the trade-off is worth it for most users.
What Workspace Doesn't Do
No cloud sync. If you want your workspace on your phone and laptop, you move it yourself with Download backup and Restore backup. For most solo users this is fine; for teams, the export-to-JSON-and-share model works but adds friction compared to auto-sync platforms.
No history. Workspace holds your current tokens; it doesn't track changes over time. If you want version history for design tokens, export snapshots periodically or commit the JSON to Git. The tool itself stays simple because simplicity is the feature.
No team permissions. Since there are no accounts, there's no "read-only for juniors" or "lock these tokens" capability. A shared workspace JSON is a shared starting point, not a shared live document. Teams that need collaborative live editing should use a dedicated design token platform (Tokens Studio, Specify, etc.) alongside UDT rather than as a replacement for those tools.